1. December 3, 2010

    Vi(m) vs. (Emacs)

    At the risk of re-firing the never ending war between users of these two text editors, I thought I’d try a bit of an experiment: Learn both!

    With the slow code-rot of Textmate happening, I’d decided that it might be time to pick up a new editor, one that’s both actively maintained but also extremely well adapted to programming in languages other than Ruby. I mean, lets face it, Textmate was intended for Ruby development on the Mac and it does that admirably.

    Enter the classic open-source text editors!

    I decided to start from a place with at least a passing familiarity from my unix knowledge.

    Over the past couple of months I’ve been using Vim, MacVim more specifically. It’s been an interesting trip so far, one that I wish I’d have taken a bit sooner. I’ve been comfortable with the most basic commands for many years since it’s a default editor on basically any standard unix. Editing Apache config files being the primary use at that time.

    Once I started digging in past the / search and saving files I quickly realized just how powerful an editor vim really is. I really admire the focus on keyboard work that is often missing from more full-featured IDEs. This is text, just text, so lets just focus on that. One thing that I didn’t know I needed in an editor was bookmarks. Being able to quickly jump around a file, back and forth to a regular place, was something that I think I was really missing from what I’ve used for years.

    I’m not going to do an exhaustive analysis of what makes vim so great right now, but just to open the discussion a bit.

    Next up is Emacs. I haven’t really ever used this editor but I’m going to change that. It, too, seems to be powerful in the same ways that vim is, but with a different flavour to it. I guess I’ll have to see myself why there’s such a long-running debate about which is better.

  2. September 26, 2010

    Welcome to Nesta and a new Design

    Well, if you’re seeing this, welcome to the new site. In addition to moving to heroku as a platform, I’ve switched over to using nesta as a cms system. I’ve also done up a new design, which is a complete first for me since I ususally take templates found around the internet.

    Nesta itself is a very minimal system that uses haml, markdown and that’s really it. No database as all the posts and pages are markdown files on disk. The simple elegance is quite a change from the complex systems I’ve used in the past. Of course the consequence of that is any feature I add I have to code up itself.

    Nesta is written in Ruby, but unlike many systems, it’s not Rails. Instead, it’s the very minimal framework Sinatra.

  3. September 1, 2010

    cached-commons: javascript API

    You probably already use Google’s AJAX Libraries as a CDN for your JavaScripts. But what do you do when Google is slow to add your favorite JavaScript library? Lance Pollard has created Cached Commons , an API for common Javascripts and stylesheets, cached and optimized on GitHub’s CDN.

    Cached Commons lists dozens of scripts under categories like visualization, Ajax, syntax highlighting, HTML5, Flash, and testing, complete with links to project sources, demos, even documenation. Don’t see a script you want? Just fork the project and your script for everyone to share.

    It looks like CSS libraries are on the TODO list, just like I had asked of Google in Episode 0.3.2!

    [ Source on GitHub ] [ Homepage ]

    via thechangelog.com

    Definitely a great idea. In this age of widespread CDN use, it makes a great deal of sense to use cached sources for such commonly used things. The Google CDN for jQuery is definitely a planned bare minimum in my world. Looks like this will accent that really nicely.

  4. September 1, 2010

    Death to Design Awards

    “Ego is the single greatest obstacle to innovation, collaboration and progress.”

    via changeobserver.designobserver.com

    I can’t disagree on involving ‘non-designers’ in the process of design awards. In a world where everyone can be considered a designer, ones that are that as a profession have just as much right to an opinion on good design as anyone else.